Check Your Head: Deluxe Edition

Capitol; 2009

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Critical hindsight's declared Licensed to Ill their fun, guilty-pleasure introduction and Paul's Boutique their visionary artistic statement, but as history tells things it was Check Your Head that made sure the Beastie Boys were sticking around. It was their return to the Top 10 of Billboard's album chart, it reinvented them as a new mutation of the West Coast punk rocker via NYC, and it paved the way for their 1990s-hipster Grand Royal empire. Most of all, it reintroduced the Beastie Boys to a demographic that, three years after their previous album, was now said to listen to "alternative rock"-- and at a time when being deep into hip-hop was still considered a sort of weird trait for a white teenager to have, that proved to be a canny lateral move.

Nobody really knew at the time that numerous other, stupider, more aggro bands would take the punk-rap structure of Check Your Head and warp it into the testosterone-poisoned mookery of the Woodstock-torching late 90s. Nobody could predict that its meat-and-potatoes approach to live-band rap would soon be shown up spectacularly by the far tighter Roots. And nobody foresaw that the appeal of its loose, garage-funk instrumentals would begin to fade once Bosco Mann started Daptone rolling and showed people what the pros sounded like. So looking at Check Your Head in hindsight and saying it's aged poorly is largely an issue of unfortunate circumstance; I certainly remember it being fairly invigorating at the time (the time, in this case, being high school). So how's it hold up as its own thing, without the weight of 17 years of inferior imitations and superior refinements upon it?

Well, if you look at it in terms of what they lost from their previous two albums, the biggest thing going against Check Your Head is its strange lack of the smart-assed, literate, quick-witted playfulness that had previously informed their lyrics. Never mind its most infamously-quotable lyric, from "Pass the Mic"-- "Everybody's rappin' like it's a commercial/ Actin' like life is a big commercial," which was supposed to rhyme "rehearsal" instead and got left in as a joke at Mike D's expense. Aside from the nimble "Finger Lickin' Good", the real issue is that most of the lyrics focus on sledgehammer impact at the expense of the high concepts and slippery wordplay they'd exhibited on Paul's Boutique. "Jimmy James" is still the jam, but it's surprising just how sketched-out and simple those otherwise vibrant-seeming lyrics are, and while the Rollins-grunt platitudes in "Gratitude" might sound energizing with those heavy-stomping Sabbath-funk riffs underneath, it's missing that spark of trickster glee that first made them great.

If you didn't know better, you might think the lyrics on Check Your Head were an afterthought-- and, well, they kind of were. The album originally started out as a jam-heavy instrumental work, where the Beasties refamiliarized themselves with their instruments-- MCA on bass, Ad-Rock on guitar and Mike D on drums, with an odd assortment of session hands including carpenter/keyboardist "Money Mark" Nishita and percussionist Juanito Vazquez. Most of the album was built with an then-unconventional self-sampling approach, where live instruments were cut-up and reassembled from numerous takes, arising from ideas that spontaneously transmogrified and shot into different directions. In combining that approach with the overdriven, semi-lo-fi, blown-out production, it proved that the Beasties could find a new tack on their sonic workmanship without needing a Rick Rubin or some Dust Brothers to guide them (though co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr. proved a good partner). Still, it's a bit of a mishmash: sublime moments like the hallucinogenic peace-and-love dub of "Something's Got to Give" and the inspired weirdness of Sly & the Family Stone's "Time for Livin'" gone near-unrecognizable as hardcore punk have to share room with tracks that either sound a little too sloppily anything-goes (the rattletrap fuzz-rock "Stand Together") or come across like half-formed funk jams with great percussion, slinky Hammonds, not much else ("Funky Boss" and "Pow").

Lest you think the score's a bit uncharitable towards what many fans think is the Beasties' second-best album, it's factoring in this deluxe edition's bonus disc and warning you off buying this particular package. Yes, you get "The Skills to Pay the Bills", a shoulda-made-the-album B-side if there ever was one, but it also includes some of the least essential B-sides ever-- dick-around jokes like Mike D's yowling lounge act "Netty's Girl", the RZA-sniffing-paint kung-fu-funk goof "Drunken Praying Mantis Style", the unremitting horror of "Boomin' Granny"-- as well as some completists-only live tracks and more versions of "So What Cha Want" than you will likely ever need (feel free to draw the line after the classic Soul Assassin remix). Plus you get "Drinkin' Wine", in case you ever wanted evidence that the Beasties had a Side 6 of Sandinista! moment.

Maybe Check Your Head doesn't hit the same rap-geek nerves that Licensed to Ill or Paul's Boutique did, but let's look at it this way: It was a worthwhile experiment that resulted in some vital music. The Beastie Boys knew that Paul's was finding appreciation as a cult album, but they couldn't recapture its feeling, not after its commercial failure left them practically forced to take a new tack. Making that approach a smaller-budget, DIY/punk mutation of everything they'd tried along the way and starting from the ground up as a band rather than a crew of MCs was an inspired idea. Going back to the studio to polish that approach up resulted in their second #1 album, 1994's Ill Communication, which does most of what Check Your Head does just a little better and funnier. But if time has diluted the impact of Check Your Head, clamping on some ear goggles and turning the EQ to its most bass-expanding level is compensation enough.